ICMA 2010 Conference

This past week I traveled to San Jose California to attend my first International City/County Management Association meeting.  I flew in on Saturday in order to be sure to attend the activities Sunday morning.  This also allowed me the opportunity to explore a little bit of downtown San Jose that afternoon.  Since I stayed in a hotel closer to the airport, I needed to take a ten minute light rail trip to get downtown.  Since San Jose's light rail approximately 20 years old, it was possible to see the established transit oriented development along the route.  The downtown was full of interesting walkways, restaurants, and green spaces. My friend and I also took the bus in search of an area three miles away from downtown called Santana Row.  She was so right in what she said during the ride with "You can feel the pulse of a city by riding its buses".


Starting Sunday morning, the ICMA conference encompassed a mixture of networking and professional development opportunities.  The first experience was doing speed coaching which like dating gives participants ten minutes to ask questions of a City Manager before switching.  It offered me the opportunity to get additional guidance from managers across the country in how to develop skills and experience to eventually become a city manager.  However, I found it as equally helpful to interact with managers during the breakfast and lunch breaks and mixtures.  Through these venues, I networked with managers across the country and Canada

I went to a variety of sessions as well.  I found panel discussions that were able to generalize specific examples so they can be applied to other cities along with the round table discussions to be the most beneficial and interesting.  Of the panel discussions, my favorite would have to be the one on making the best hiring decisions.  The panel approach worked very well in affording a variety of interesting methods used to hire Department Heads, Assistant City Managers, and City Managers.  The first approach appeared to be pretty straight forward, however, the others consisted of a multiple day affair that consisted of a combination of socials, group interviews, and individual interviews. 

One of the most interesting round tables focused on communicating budget cuts to the public.  I liked the honest dialog of a variety of methods used by multiple municipalities and why they were or were not effective.  My other favorite round table session focused on ethics.  We worked as a group through a case study that challenged us incorporate identify and utilize the applicable tenants of ICMA's code of ethics.

There were so many sessions provided during each of the time slots throughout the conference that it was difficult to attend all that I was interested in.  I appreciated the fact that ICMA gave conference goers a CD that included the power point presentations from all of the sessions so I could get the basic information about the sessions I could not attend.